Numerous news articles (Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, NY Times) have
been singing the praises of Palm’s newest user interface / WebOS platform.
Question:
So why the troubled Palm Pre quarterly sales outlook and market share disappointment? (Total worldwide smartphone shipments -- all brands -- in 2009 were 172.3 million worldwide, with Palm coming in a weak 7th on the list of top vendors).
Answer:
Our answer, based on one of our favorite Chasm Institute topics – is the important difference between Product and Whole Product. The Palm Pre does have some significant smartphone performance strengths vs. Apple’s iPhone, but that is looking at it way too narrowly. The real advantage that iPhone enjoys among U.S. smartphone consumers is not in product performance (i.e. “product advantage”), but in Whole Product advantage.
We define Whole Product as the essential factors, over and above the core technology, that help predict market share wins or losses. These include the 6 Whole Product factors of:
- Industrial design
- Company brand name
- Product sub-brand name
- Degree of excited word-of-mouth among target customers with money and intent to buy (yes, that can be measured)
- The # of applications available and the # of motivated developers committed to the platform
- Compelling and motivated distribution channel(s)
Does this list seem like an uneven playing field -- with clear Apple iPhone dominance?
Sure does – iPhone wins against Palm Pre on all 6 of these Whole Product factors. That may explain iPhone’s 97.9% Q4 2009 year-over-year growth – besting Nokia (37.3%), RIM (41.2%) and all the others, including Palm.
Stay tuned for an interesting collision with Google’s Adroid in the year ahead.
Side note: by the way, Apple has previously (and ironically) suffered from the same disease – having a great product but weak whole product. Think Mac vs. PC from 1984 on. So Apple knows what it feels like to be on the losing end of the “Whole Product” battle !
>> What are some key Whole Product factors that your company overlooks? ... or perhaps dominates with?
Let us know your thoughts – we’d love to hear from you.